Guidelines and Tips

Issues that Real Time Search Algorithm Updates May Cause

Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms have been updated several times in recent years and it has caused panic in majority of SEO circles. A very less number of SEOs seemed to have benefits from these updates. The SEO job continues to becoming tougher as Google has moved towards implementing real time algorithm updates. Hence, the consequences of these updates are worth mentioning in this article.

Algorithmic Penalties and Troubleshooting

It’s tougher to get the algorithmic penalties troubleshot as compared to troubleshooting manual penalties. The manual penalty lets the site owner know that he/she has been hit. On the other hand, the site owner may not know if he/she faces imposition of algorithmic penalty.

If you want to know whether your website has been hit, the easier way to do this is to view the time graph of internet traffic. If your website has suffered drop in traffic at the times of algorithmic updates, you have been hit by penalty.

Another way to diagnose if you are hit by algorithmic penalty is to look for drop in organic traffic against the queries even if the website stays at high rank in the map. Nevertheless, many companies overlook this diagnostic check and continue to wonder about the low performance of their websites.

The drawback of this diagnostic check is that the site owners would need to analyze huge amount of data if they are not aware of algorithmic update schedules in the past. Difficulty in checking for algorithmic penalties has been the major issue for many people and it continues to be a headache.

Confusions that Come With Real-Time Algorithm Updates

With the real time algorithmic updates, the search engine’s crawling is done in a randomized manner. Hence, it would take weeks, or even months, for a website to be reviewed after the change in website’s structure and addition of new links.

It means that you might not be able to find a match between the dates when you made changes and the dates when penalty was applied. This situation can lead you to have another confusion regarding the reason behind drop in traffic; i.e. imposition of a penalty or a server issue. Based on this scenario, it will be difficult for you or your SEO team to identify the real issue.

Moreover, the frequent algorithmic changes would understandably affect the rankings of many sites. That would lead the site owners to assume that they have been hit by penalty (which may not be true in a number of cases).

Testing of Black Hat SEO

With an automated process of penalizing websites, developers working at Google will look into more black-hat SEO processes to set stricter standards for the websites. There is a chance that many of the websites, which use organic but effec tive ways to get ranked faster, would face penalties. That will make it more difficult for the penalized websites to recover from damage quickly.

Could There Be Any Benefits of Real-Time Algorithm Updates

The ultimate benefit of Real time algorithmic updates is definitely for the search engine users. Google, with these efforts, seems to be striving hard to provide better search results.